The invention relates generally to textile yarn winding methods and automatic textile yarn winders and, more particularly, to a novel method and apparatus for producing a predetermined number of full yarn packages on an automatic winder.
Automatic textile yarn winders are generally used to rewind or wind yarn, furnished in the form of cops from a ring spinning machine or another spinning station, to make conical or cylindrical cross-wound yarn packages commonly referred to as bobbins and also known as cheeses or cheese packages. As a rule, the size of a given lot or run of a textile yarn winder, i.e., the total number of yarn packages to be produced during a single operation, is fixed in advance. A lot or run may also include different batches of yarn packages, i.e., differing packages formed from yarn supplies having different yarn characteristics. In principle, there are two possible ways to end production of a particular lot. One is to interrupt the winding process after all the supply cops of one batch have been wound. For many years, however, it has been recognized that this procedure has the disadvantage of producing a large number of incompletely wound yarn packages. As early as the 1970s, this disadvantage was overcome by successively shutting down the winding stations individually after full packages were produced at the end of the lot or batch.
For determining the specific time at which successive shutdown of winding stations could be started, the number of winding stations used to produce the yarn packages was subtracted from the total number of yarn packages to be produced. Once that subtracted value was reached, the winding stations were then shut down successively. This known method is disclosed in German Patent DE 37 33 788.
By that method, it was necessary each time the yarn package was changed to determine the total of all the cheese packages produced on all the winding stations and compare it with a target variable. The order in which the winding stations were taken out of operation was distributed completely randomly over the entire winding machine.